Today's computer users are highly mobile individuals. Whether on business trips, on vacations, or coming to and from work, these individuals are readily identifiable by their use of laptops, enhanced-functionality cellular telephones, Palm Pilots™, Blackberries™, and other portable electronic devices. Indeed, many establishments provide Internet connections that cater to individuals who may be merely passing through the establishment for a short period of time. For instance, Internet connections are available at airports and hotels, and even in restaurants and coffee shops. Often times, these individuals take advantage of these transitory Internet connections to send and view emails.
Because of the portable nature of the electronic devices, there are certain limits to their capabilities. For instance, portable electronic devices generally have less processing power and have relatively primitive display screen capabilities as compared to their desktop counterparts. Wireless connection issues also affect the use of portable electronic devices. For example, there may not be a wireless connection available in some locations, and even if a wireless connection is available, use of that wireless connection can be costly in terms of amount of online time and/or amount of bandwidth utilized to send and receive data. These costs become much more severe if the only available wireless connection is one having low bandwidth and/or high latency.
Email provides a clear illustration of the limitations of portable electronic devices. A typical individual can receive anywhere from a dozen to 100 emails per day. The total email volume can be as much as 12 MB of data, for instance. Moreover, one fourth of emails may have attachments, where 90% of email data may comprise attachments. Email may be received at any time, but is generally received between the hours of 8:00 AM to 6:00 PM.
For a mobile individual with a portable electronic device, that individual might check his email every two hours. Generally, the individual uses an email application in the portable electronic device in an “offline” mode when a connection to a network is not present. In the offline mode, the email application accesses and manipulates email stored in a local cache, as opposed to retrieving and processing email from a remote server when in an “online” mode. When the email application is in the offline mode, the individual can read copies of previously received or sent emails that are locally cached, and can compose emails to send. Meanwhile, real-time (new) email is being received at the remote server, but is not being forwarded to or retrieved by the unconnected portable electronic device.
When the connection to a network is established, the email application can transition to the online mode. In the online mode, the new email that is remotely stored in the server is downloaded to the portable electronic device (and appears in an inbox) and email that the individual has composed while offline can finally be sent from the portable electronic device. The downloading of the new email to the portable electronic device is part of a synchronization process in some email applications, where email records in the local cache on the portable electronic device are updated to be consistent with email records at the remote server (or vice versa).
As most email users are aware, offline modes are clumsy and inconvenient. When the online mode is entered, synchronization is also clumsy and time consuming. For instance, given the high number of emails and large attachments that may potentially need to be downloaded from the remote server during synchronization in the online mode, the synchronization process can take an inordinate amount of time to complete, especially if the only available connection to the remote server is a low-bandwidth and/or high-latency wireless connection. Moreover, when the downloading occurs during synchronization, the email application attempts to download all of the new emails from the remote server (e.g., download “all or nothing”)—once the download process starts, the individual has to wait until the process finishes, which again, can be extremely time consuming and annoying to the individual if there are large attachments to download and if the individual is in a rush. If the download fails anytime during the process, then the entire download has to be performed again from the beginning.
This downloading further highlights other shortcomings of current implementations of portable electronic devices. In order to properly cater to the highly mobile individual, portable electronic devices should allow that individual to receive email anytime and anywhere. However, having the capability to download and read email only when logged in at docking stations at an airport or at a coffee shop is not consistent with the habits and needs of the mobile individual. Wireless networks attempt to address this issue by providing wireless connectivity in a greater number of areas, but the high volume of email and the large size of attachments to download can make wireless connectivity expensive and inconvenient as described above.
There are implementations that “strip” attachments at the remote server or at some network location behind a corporate firewall. This attachment stripping does reduce the amount of data that is to be received by the electronic device, and therefore might provide some improvements in performance. However, such attachment-stripping implementations typically require installation and maintenance of specialized software components at the remote email server and/or at the network location behind the firewall. Information technology departments are notorious for their reluctance to install and maintain such additional components in their existing systems, due to factors such as expense, labor for installation and maintenance, compatibility and/or reliability issues, and so forth.
While the above problems have been explained in the context of portable electronic devices, these problems may be encountered with desktop computers or other stationary electronic devices as well. That is, wherever there is a low-bandwidth and/or high-latency networking environment, email applications of such stationary electronic devices will experience downloading and synchronization limitations and difficulties.